Broken Social Scene

To come even close to duplicating the unanticipated, overwhelming success of Broken Social Scene’s tour-de-force You Forgot it in People must have been an impossible dream at best for this Toronto, Canada collective. Sadly, the followup falls far short of its predecessor. What is apparent immediately is that most of the new album’s songs push and pull in too many directions while dense arrangements and cluttered production hide any semblance of memorable melodies to give the listener reasons to return. It’s an indistinguishable mess lacking any of the kind of ramshackle, low-fidelity, sound collage charm preferred by peers such as The Flaming Lips and Pavement. Gone is the melancholy lyricism (“Lover’s Spit”), and the urgent immediacy and impressionistic wordplay (“Cause = Time”) favored by the previous album. What stands today to represent the band are a myriad of tricky ideas, attention-grabbing rhythms and complicated studio experiments in dire need of a song to support the unremarkable musical athleticism flaunted by way of time misspent in the recording studio.